Introduction

Earlier this year, AMD launched their Radeon HD 7800 Series. The GPU Pitcairn is a downscale from the HD 7900 "Tahiti" silicon that introduced AMD's new Graphics Core Next architecture. Targeting a wide price-range in-between $250-$350, the HD 7800 series falls into the market-segment both AMD and NVIDIA have referred to as the "sweet-spot" segment. Apart from 1280 stream processors, Pitcairn has 80 Texture Memory Units (TMUs), 32 ROPs (Raster Operations), and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface holding 2 GB of memory.

PowerColor's HD 7870 PCS+ Vortex II is a fully customized HD 7870 design implementation. It comes with a dual-fan cooler and a large overclock out of the box, making it one of the fastest HD 7870 cards around. We have seen many price reductions bringing the price of the HD 7870 down significantly. At this time, the PowerColor HD 7870 Vortex II retails at $290, which is $40 higher than the cheapest HD 7870 available.